A Second Generation John
by Regency
Summary: Luke meets his father, Tim Spencer, for the last time and starts to see an uncanny resembleance. They're both drunks and they always let down the ones they love.


Author: Regency

Title: A Second-Generation John

Characters: Luke Spencer, Tim Spencer

Rating: TEEN

Summary: As he is dying, Tim Spencer asked for his son, Luke, who wonders if he's become the very man he despises most. There's no happy ending for these men.

Author's Notes: For the life of me, I can't find the story I'm remembering of Luke's parents. So here, it is apparently, their (Luke and Bobbie's) mother was a hooker or something and Tim was some sort of John. Their mother was dying of a burst appendix and Tim just drank down a bottle of the cheap stuff, and then walked out, leaving them alone with her. She obviously died and they never saw their father again. Is this a figment of my imagination?

ANII: Not beta'd, errors all mine.

Disclaimer: I don't own either of these characters. ABC does.

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"It's true then?" His inquiry rang out on like a twenty-one gun salute, stalling Luke's plan to pour another finger of scotch in his glass. "You answer everything with a drink. Just like your old man." Suddenly, losing his thirst, Luke slammed the tumbled on the oak side table. 

"Let's get something straight, Tim. I'm nothing like you and I don't consider you any kind of father to me. I came because Barbara Jean asked, not so that you could ease your conscience. It's a little late for you to be imparting wisdom on your misguided son, so don't try it." He decided he'd take that drink after all and drank it down quick. Sobriety was for men who hadn't grown up in whorehouses.

"Why'd you come here?" Withered by a hard life and a tough fight with liver disease, Tim Spencer wasn't in much of a position to compel Luke to answer, but still he tried. He shifted ever so slowly, cautious of his jutting bones and brittle joints, until he sat fully upright. He could look at his son more easily this way, something he'd never bothered to do when Luke was a boy. He'd made a handsome man. Yes, he had. Maybe, in death, he'd find Ruby and thank her for how he'd turned out--at least the good parts.

Luke turned an antique chair around and straddled it, sparing his father a disinterested look. He wasn't in the mood for this sort of idiocy. He had a life, where people loved him, where people didn't despise him. He had children, who he'd--he'd watched grow up. Bile rose in his throat as he recalled a day when he'd looked at his little girl, so raven-haired and sweet at age eight, and saw a near perfect replica of her mother, only not as sweet and more like him than he'd ever wanted for a child of his. He'd missed that happening; he hadn't been there.

He sat up straight.

That wasn't the same though. He hadn't let their mother die, he never would've. He never would've left her writhing in pain, dying. He had loved her, loved her to this day. Luke Spencer knew how to truly love a woman. His father didn't know how to do that. What his father had shown Lena Eckert wasn't the adoration Luke had lavished on Laura for twenty years. He doubted Tim had any idea what to do with that kind of devotion. No, they weren't the same.

"You didn't answer me." Tim stared at his son, face slack and drawn without hope to lift it slightly. He had outgrown hope at age twenty-nine. He thought something similar might've been said for his boy, who wore decades of heavy drink like a badge of honor, a sign that _he could take it!_ Yep, that was his son, his work.

"I already told you. Barbara Jean asked me to see you, something about _unfinished business,_" he mimicked without an ounce of sentiment. He didn't owe this man a moment of his time; as it was he'd given him far too much.

"Ah. Bobbie still knows how to twist your arm. She always had a way of working men--" Luke was out of his chair faster than Tim would've thought possible, taking hold of his frail arm in a harsh grip.

"_You_ don't get to say _anything_ about Barbara Jean, or the way she deals with anyone. She is incredible, no thanks to you."

Tim didn't shrink away from the rage in Luke's voice. He wouldn't have; it used to be his voice. And that grip? Used to be his, too. Everything he was as a youngster; his recklessness, his selfishness, his open-ended self-righteousness, was alive and well in his son, and he didn't doubt it lived in his grandchildren as well. This roughness didn't bother him. His nurse handled him this way--gentleness wasn't in her nature.

"It's funny, Lucas, that you'd react this way. Didn't I do this to you?" Tim stared up into the startled blue eyes that were Lena through and through. Luke looked at his hand, squeezing his father's arm until the skin beneath his grasp ached to peel away from the stress. He let go and backed away, leaving his father only to watch him, no recriminations at hand, and yet no quarter given.

He took to his chair, back on his guard. This man was nothing to him, had been nothing since he was--what?--fourteen years old when he'd stayed long enough to watch his mother die and not lifted a hand to save her. A sense of pride had brought him here today. He'd come to show his father that he had outgrown the brothel where'd he'd laid his head at night, that he had a big house, and a rich wife, and all the scotch he could stomach in a sitting. He'd come to make his case, that they weren't anything alike, and that forgiveness wasn't something he ever gave, especially not to men like Tim Spencer. He'd come to look into this man's eyes and feel nothing--instead he felt as though he was staring into an hourglass inscribed with his face, and Tim was what waited when the sand ran out.

If he were honest with himself, something he hardly ever was, he'd admit that he'd spent a long life peering over his shoulder, fearing that fate, fearing becoming the monster in his reflection--the monster he already was.

"What do you want, old man? Whatever you're looking for you're not going to find with me. I'm that grudge-holding kind."

"Good," Tim responded, looking almost proud of that one thing. "A good grudge'll keep you mad as hell, and mad men don't die." He laughed at Luke's bewildered expression. "I should know. It's easy to live, Luke, but dying is hell on a good time." An air bubble caught in his windpipe and he gagged, coughing and hitting his chest ineffectually.

Luke watched uneasily, looking towards the open door for his father's day nurse, but she didn't appear. With an aggravated sigh, he came over to strike Tim on the back. His gaunt body shook with each blow, seeming to absorb them with bruising ease. At last, the episode seemed to pass and he retreated to his side of the room again. It didn't seem right that the body should become so fragile.

Tim wiped viscous mucus from his lip with a handkerchief he kept on hand. Embroidered on it were the faded letters LE. A gift from a man who'd given Lena more than he ever had. He folded it over to tuck into the pocket on his robe. He had a number of fits like this every day, more fits than breaths, he thought sometimes.

"Thanks."

"Don't mention it," Luke answered genuinely. It wasn't as easy as it he thought it would be to let him drown in his own bodily fluids. He'd always considered himself a tough guy who was capable of pretty much anything, but he hadn't been able to see his father die this way. That took a darker hate than he carried inside of him. Knowing that only made him hate the man more for his unpunished crime.

Tim inhaled carefully, filling his paper-thin lungs with air he'd only recently considered precious. He never got enough; his lungs, as well as everything else, had started to fail him.

"You've got some of your mother's mercy in you. I never deserved that."

"That wasn't mercy." He rubbed his rough hands together and saw for a moment the same ones that had struck his mother too often in his childhood. "It's called humanity, I don't think you're familiar with the concept."

Tim inspected his only son and wasn't impressed with what he saw. He was a good-looking man all right, probably even striking in his day, but that was all. He was a hoodlum in an expensive suit, no doubt bankrolled by his wife. He wore 'cheap-corner hooker' like Aqua Velva. His son was a John who'd either married foolish--on her part--or married damned well. Not everyone had that kind of luck.

"What did you do with your life that was so much better than me?"

Luke laughed a great laugh and lobbed his antique chair across the room. "What did I do, dad? What _didn't_ I do? I danced a thousand moonlight dances. I loved and married an angel! We dodged the mob for ten years. We traveled the world together and raised a great kid at the same time. We came back from the dead--I came back from the dead! We lasted for twenty--" Then, it all came down. "Twenty years…before we fell apart. We had an incredible life. That's what was so much better than you." He almost sounded honest, with both of them.

"Don't tell me," Tim went on, unfazed by his son's melodramatic outburst. "Then, you left her?"

"That's not the point."

"I think it is." He wiped the corner of his mouth with the handkerchief, then clung to it as a touchstone. "In the end, you left her behind, because she wasn't good enough for you. She wasn't _really_ the angel you built in your head and held in your heart. She was nothing more than what you imagined. In fact, she wasn't even that. Why else would you be cruising through life on easy street with what's-her-name?"

"Tracy," he corrected automatically, outwardly refusing to take the bait.

"You say you like that your _angel_ made you better, then you turn around and become worse than she ever imagined just because you don't think she can see you anymore. That's not love, kid, that's just sad. You never deserved her anymore than I deserved Lena."

"Bullshit." His father's words were matching things he'd told himself and he didn't like it, not this self-righteous sermonizing. They were from the same seedy little town, the same wrong side of the tracks--but made different choices, taken different paths. They should've been two different men. The hourglass in his head seemed emptier than before.

Tim felt a smirk coming on. "You like--no, you love that Tracy doesn't care how bad you are. She isn't gonna make you be stand-up, and she isn't gonna ask you to be a _better man_. That was Laura's job and she most certainly isn't Laura."

Luke refrained from grabbing his father this time, but it was a near thing. "Don't say her name! You don't get to say her name."

Tim's smirk widened to show a row of sturdy teeth, one last impossibility of a Spencer. "Which wife are we talking about? The angel or the other one?"

"Either," Luke scowled. "There's no all-day pass to my life. You missed that, you gave it up and left! These women are the loves of my life. Who I am, for good or bad, is because of them. You can't lay a finger on that. That's something you don't get to ruin."

"I don't have to ruin anything, Lucas Lorenzo. You ended your fairy tale long before I started dying."

Clear blue eyes pierced a pair of murky brown. This was the only battle they had left. Fifty-odd able years had passed them by and they hadn't found each other for this showdown yet. Luke was just a kid when he stood toe-to-toe with Tim to shield his mother and his sister from the worst of the his flaring temper. He could take the beatings and the bleeding if Barbara Jean didn't have to. Today, he was an old man, too.

"You are nothing," he spit out with more venom than Lucky had used to condemn he and Laura to hell not a lifetime in the past.

"Then, I will die as I lived: as nothing. The question is: how far do you have to fall before you hit the same rock bottom…son?"

Luke snorted. "You get a kick out of calling me your kid today, but when I needed you to be there you were too busy screwing some hooker on the west end of nowhere. Don't claim me now that I've made it and you're a walking dead man."

He bothered to right the chair he'd tossed on his way out. He was a man of some class after all.

Pain ripped through Tim's side, but he didn't answer to it for a change; it was old news. "Hey, Lucas? Where's your 'Father of the Year' tie? If you're so much better than me, then I should see one." He hadn't asked his son here to make peace. He'd wanted the chance of to make one honest-to-god connection with him, even if it was the worst possible one.

Luke's face tightened in frustration. There was no _body_ to beat worth beating, no soul to shake. This was the last time he'd see his father and it was as pathetic an occasion as the rest.

"Don't feel too bad. Spencers weren't built for fatherhood. Our children are born to let us down."

A pang of regret seeped into Tim's voice and rang loud and clear. Luke paused and Tim swallowed, damned and shamed. He'd never been an emotional man. _Envy, wasn't it?_

"Mine never did, despite the piss poor job I did of teaching them right from wrong. Their mother took care of that, most of the time without my help." He shoved his angry hands into his money-lined pockets. "I'll say this much, Tim, you sure as hell taught me the right way to leave."

Luke wasn't rattled as he walked out of that bedroom that smelled of antiseptic and impending death. He wasn't even truly moved when his father called out his name and he didn't feel compelled to stop. But he shuddered when his father coughed, then hacked in obvious pain--and no one came.


End file.
